Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce

Some of the comments here are well-intentioned, but misguided. This is not a marinara sauce. This is not a southern Italian sauce -- Marcella was from Emilia Romagna in the north. This is not your nonna's Sunday gravy. Most especially, this is not a sauce to "doctor" up. This sauce challenges our over-the-top American notion of what a tomato sauce is. Its whole point is its utter simplicity -- a sauce far greater than the sum of its parts. If you want to add sausage and sugar and garlic and whatnot, do so, but do not imagine that will have anything in common with Marcella's sauce. Please do not put diced onion in it -- the peeled and halved onion is there merely to sacrifice its mellow oniony essence, not to show off its assertive side. Do not add sugar. Not even a pinch. Not the first time at least. Americans are trained to crave a sweetness in everything. This SHOULD be somewhat acidic. And if you're using good tomatoes and good unsalted butter, both of those ingredients will not make you reach for sugar. I recommend either Muir Glen or Hunt's whole peeled plum tomatoes. 90% of the so-called "Marzano" tomatoes you can buy in this country are either fake-Marzano grown in California, or are otherwise insipid. Even many of the imported ones can be terrible. Marzano is a region in Italy from which those tomatoes get their name. Like the taste of wine is dependent on the soil and climate for its ultimate taste -- its "terrior" -- so, too, the Marzano tomato. Do not substitute olive oil for the butter. The butter is there for its buttery luxuriousness, and it is there because northern Italians like Marcella were far more apt to use a dairy fat than one derived from olives. (She was born in the land of dairy cows and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.) There are a million olive-oil-based sauces. This is not one of them. Do not, whatever you do, use canned diced tomatoes. Those bits of mechanically thrashed tomato are far too hard and will never melt down to the desired texture. The crucial step that PJ left off of this recipe is the direction that Marcella gives for "mashing any large pieces of tomato in the pan with a wooden spoon" as you occasionally stir the sauce as it simmers. This breaks the tomatoes down into a more cohesive whole, so that using diced tomatoes or blending the finished sauce -- which would ruin its intended consistency -- becomes unnecessary. I'm sure people will think I'm being pretentious, a purist. I don't care. I tweak recipes constantly as well. But not this one. There is no point in tarting up a sauce whose whole reason for being is its utter elemental simplicity. Make this delicious sauce, at least the first time, entirely as it was intended. If after that you want to make your own changes, by all means do so. But I doubt you'll want to or need to.

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It's amazing how many different "traditional" tomato sauces have been handed down in Italian families! My family is Sicilian, and my grandmother, mother, and aunts all made their sauce the same way, and I do, too. In your "sauce pot" (generally not used for anything else!), brown meatballs, chunks of pork and beef, a few sausages until not quite cooked. At the last minute, add a clove of garlic cut into large pieces and smash it into the hot oil until browned. Remove and discard most of the garlic and transfer the meats to a platter, discard most of the oil, but leave all the browned bits in the bottom. Add two 28oz. cans of Redpack crushed tomatoes in puree, one 28oz. can Redpack puree, and one can full of water, salt, pepper and fresh basil torn with your fingers. Bring it all to a boil, carefully add the meat back into the pot, and rinse off the platter that held the meat with a little water and add that to the sauce. Bring it back to a boil, then simmer slowly, partially covered and stirring often for at least two hours. Add a little more fresh basil at the end. I don't know why it had to be Redpack tomatoes, but I have never tried to tamper with success! I also know that no one ever added sugar to their sauce, and using onions would have been cause for getting the evil eye! Amazingly, my sauce tastes the same as my Grandma's and Mom's, and every time I make it I am transported back to Sunday mornings after church, sauce bubbling on the stove, my brother stealing meatballs behind Mom's back. I believe that every time we make a family recipe we bring back all the generations before us, and they are with us at the stove, stirring the sauce, baking the cookies, and stealing the meatballs!

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